In the mid-1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then their labor markets have become more dynamic. This paper studies the implications of such reforms for the duration distribution of unemployment, with particular emphasis on the changes in the duration...

Firing costs are often blamed for unemployment. This paper investigates this well spread belief. The main points are two. First, firing costs are modelled in an efficiency wage model to capture their effects on employment through wages. Secondly, dismissal conflicts are modelled explicitly. In...

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to investigate if seniority-based pay is used asa motivational device for production workers. Alternatively, seniority-based pay could simplybe a wage setting rule not necessarily related to the provision of incentives. Unlike previouspapers, we...

There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually noliterature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there isessentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment...

This paper studies the duration pattern of fixed-term contracts and the determinants of the transformation of these into permanent ones. To address this issue we estimate a duration model for temporary employment, with competing risks of flowing into permanent employment versus non-employment,...

We propose an alternative method for measuring intergenerational mobility. Traditional methods based on panel data provide measurements that are scarce, difficult to compare across countries and almost impossible to get across time. In particular this means that we do not know how...

We propose a new econometric estimation method for analysing the probability of leaving un-employment using uncompleted spells from repeated cross-section data, which can be especially useful when panel data are not available. The proposed method-of-moments-based estimator has two important...

There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually no literature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there is essentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment...

We propose a new methodology for measuring intergenerational mobility in economic wellbeing. Our method is based on the joint distribution of surnames and economic outcomes. It circumvents the need for intergenerational panel data, a long-standing stumbling block for understanding mobility. It...

An important debate centers on what procedure should be used to allocate students across public schools. We contribute to this debate by developing and estimating a model of school choices by households under one of the most popular procedures known as the Boston mechanism (BM). We recover the...